Fat32 is your regular filesystem for USB flash drive. Did you know you can switch to UDF instead of FAT32, or exfat, or ext 2,3,4? It has a lot for it.

Below, there is a post about a script called format-udf.sh, which i have tested. It works, runs fast, and the resulting UDF format is stable, enabling read-write.

Note :
You need to be careful with this script, it is so fast you can wipe and format your internal drive in a few seconds. It happened to a friend of mine, using sda, instead of sdb.

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

exFATis a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.

UDF
Good news: there is one file system that is implemented almost everywhere as well, and which does not suffer from such limitations. UDF, the Universal Disk Format, is an ISO standard originally designed for DVDs, but it is perfectly usable for USB sticks. It also supports POSIX permissions, with one killer feature for removable media: a file can belong to no specific person or group.

Conclusion :
After that, your USB stick will be usable for reading and writing with GNU/Linux and the other free operating systems of course, but also with current versions of Windows (read-only with the outdated version XP) and with MacOS.

Tested and working, showing on Trinitydog as LinuxUDF (but unstable, using a SD card, maybe caused by wrong block size).

UDF is, in principle, a write-once-and-read-only filesystem. It would never be suitable for use on a hard drive.

In Puppy, it does everything on a USB stick that you would do on a hard drive._________________I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected

I was under the impression that this was the best file system for USB sticks.

F2FS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS_________________I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected

I can't find a technical URL validating this ATM, but from experience, I
noticed that UDF takes +/- 200 Mg's less overhead on the partition than
ext? filesystems. Meaning you get +/- 200 Mg's more as storage space
on your partition. This by itself may make UDF worth using on a smaller-
sized flash-drive.

The only problem with UDF is that you can't boot from it. (Need a URL for that, too...)

The GParted team is pleased to announce a new stable release of GParted Live.

This release includes GParted 0.29.0, patches for libparted for FAT file system operations, and other improvements.

Items of note include:

Includes GParted 0.29.0 which adds the following enhancements since the last stable release:
Add support for UDF file system
Fix segmentation fault on disk with corrupted FAT file system
Fix snap-to-alignment of operations creating partitions
Based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2017/Aug/0
Linux kernel updated to 4.11.11-1
Package udftools added
Includes patched version of libparted which fixes:
check FAT32 crashes (bug 762448)
resized FAT32 not recognized by Windows (bug 759916)

This release of GParted Live has been successfully tested on VirtualBox, VMware, BIOS, UEFI, and physical computers with AMD/ATI, NVidia, and Intel graphics.

The GParted team is pleased to announce a new stable release of GParted Live.

This release includes GParted 0.29.0, patches for libparted for FAT file system operations, and other improvements.

Items of note include:

Includes GParted 0.29.0 which adds the following enhancements since the last stable release:
Add support for UDF file system
Fix segmentation fault on disk with corrupted FAT file system
Fix snap-to-alignment of operations creating partitions
Based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2017/Aug/0
Linux kernel updated to 4.11.11-1
Package udftools added
Includes patched version of libparted which fixes:
check FAT32 crashes (bug 762448)
resized FAT32 not recognized by Windows (bug 759916)

This release of GParted Live has been successfully tested on VirtualBox, VMware, BIOS, UEFI, and physical computers with AMD/ATI, NVidia, and Intel graphics.

That is interesting and coincides nicely with this thread. I can now burn the ISO to CD and have the tool available in GParted if'n I wants to try a UDF partition using my favorite partition manager,
Link to downloads for various media -->http://gparted.org/livecd.php

That would ~probably mean that the GParted 0.29.0 is going to be updated with the patch GParted Live 0.29.0.1 has received maybe?

Fat32 is your regular filesystem for USB flash drive. Did you know you can switch to UDF instead of FAT32, or exfat, or ext 2,3,4? It has a lot for it.

I'd formatted the 16GB microSD card to UDF, and indeed MS-Windows and Puppy Linux can read and write it.
But my Sansa Clip+ media player doesn't recognize it.
Nor does the LG Rebel phone.
At http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf
the author had said, in part:

Quote:

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

Five-six posts above I talked about udf's overhead on a thumb drive. The
attached pic describes the overhead taken by the udf format on an 8Mb
SD card: not quite 2 Mb's. Linux' ext2 would occupy 130 Mb's on a drive of
the same size. A difference of 128 Mb's.

I formatted the card with the mkudffs utility. Please notice the drive name:
sdd. I think udf cannot do partitions like sd1, sd2, etc.

I still haven't found a serious article comparing file systems overhead , but
there you go: empirical data.

The attached pic describes the overhead taken by the udf format on an 8Mb SD card: not quite 2 Mb's. Linux' ext2 would occupy 130 Mb's on a drive of
the same size. A difference of 128 Mb's

I formatted my 8GB SD card to ext4 (had read somewhere that works well).
It does seem to use up a few hundred MB, even though there were no files on it.
With no journal.
(Oh, I will go try some other tune2fs options)
Anyhow, the cell phone can't mount it._________________Dell E6410: Xenial, etc
Dell Mini 9, Acer Aspire One, EeePC 1018P, PowerBook G4
Intel D865GBF, Intel DQ35JOE

Bash script to format a block device (hard drive or Flash drive) in UDF. The output is a drive that can be used for reading/writing across multiple operating system families: Windows, macOS, and Linux. This script should be capable of running in macOS or in Linux.

Installation :

format-udf is a self-contained script. Simply copy format-udf.sh to a directory of your choosing. Don't forget to make it executable:

If's extremely important that format-udf use the correct block size when formatting your drive. format-udf will attempt to detect and use the correct (logical) block size. If you know what you're doing, the format-udf -b BLOCK_SIZE option can be used to explicitly override the detected block size value.

If the wrong block size is used while formatting (i.e. one that doesn't match the logical block size of your drive), the resultant drive will likely have OS compatibility issues and suffer from non-optimal performance issues.

Maximum UDF File System Capacity

The UDF format has a maximum of 2^32 blocks. With format-udf, these blocks equate to logical blocks.

If your drive's logical block size is 512 bytes, then your maximum UDF file system capacity will be 2 TiB
If your drive's logical block size is 4096 bytes, then your maximum UDF file system capacity will be 16 TiB

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